Metropolitan Hilarion: Western liberals make a grave mistake by imposing totalitarian standards on free people

Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk,
head of the Department for External Church Relations,
speaking during the weekly programme ‘The Church
and the World’ on Russia 24 TV channel on March
24, 2012, commented on the British authorities’
decision to defend in the European Court of Human
Rights the legitimacy of the corporate policy adopted
by some British commercial companies to ban the wearing
of baptismal crosses.

‘I very much regret such developments as happening
in England. I myself used to live in that country and
witnessed the way in which liberal and anti-Christian
norms conquering ever greater areas in the public space.
Because these people have not experienced persecution
against the Church, they do not know what it is when your
crosses are torn away from you’, he said. He also
shared his own remembrances of how a teacher in the school
he attended, having discovered a baptismal cross under his
shirt, began to tear it off.

‘A grave mistake is made by today’s Western
liberals who actually impose on free people the standards
of totalitarian regime’, the DECR chairman said.

‘I believe it is a sign of some madness and extreme
moral decay when such norms are not only introduced but
even discussed. What is wrong with a cross worn on
one’s neck? Who and how can it harm? Why one can
wear beads, an amulet, an image of some variety singer but
a believer cannot put on a cross under his or her clothes?
We will never agree with it and will fight against
it’, he said.